Start up: Russia’s misinformation detailed, USB-C wins!, automation woes?, and more

Posted on June 3, 2015 by charlesarthur

Endangered species? A truckstop by sunset. Photo by Indigo Skies Photography on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Because I like the cut of your jib. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

App maker files EU complaint against Google, alleging abuse of Android dominance » WSJ

Alistair Barr on the lawsuit filed by Disconnect, which makes an anti-tracking app:

The app maker alleged Google pulled Disconnect because the software disrupted Google’s tracking and advertising efforts, the source of most of the internet company’s revenue and profit. In an email included in the complaint, a Play store employee said the app was removed [from Google Play] because it prevented other apps from delivering ads. Disconnect asked European antitrust regulators to require Google to put its apps back in the Play store and treat the apps the same way Google treats its own privacy and security software. A Google spokesman called Disconnect’s claims “baseless.” Google has allowed more than 200 other privacy apps in the Play store, but blocks any apps that alter other apps’ functionality or remove their way of making money, he added, saying Google applies this policy uniformly, with strong support from Android developers.

Tricky, this: Disconnect says that the key point is that Google doesn’t hold itself to that standard on privacy and security, and that it doesn’t prevent ad-serving – just tracking. Google says that it makes the store, so it decides the rules.

Self-driving trucks are going to hit us like a human-driven truck » Medium

Scott Santens:

This is a map of the most common job in each US state in 2014. It should be clear at a glance just how dependent the American economy is on truck drivers. According to the American Trucker Association, there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the US, and an additional 5.2 million people employed within the truck-driving industry who don’t drive the trucks. That’s 8.7 million trucking-related jobs.

We can’t stop there though, because the incomes received by these 8.2 million people create the jobs of others. Those 3.5 million truck drivers driving all over the country stop regularly to eat, drink, rest, and sleep. Entire businesses have been built around serving their wants and needs. Think restaurants and motels as just two examples. So now we’re talking about millions more whose employment depends on the employment of truck drivers. But we still can’t even stop there…

…Truck driving is just about the last job in the country to provide a solid middle class salary without requiring a post-secondary degree.

You can argue about the exact numbers, but the point that it’s not just the driving that’s affected is important. See also the next link about sewing.

Made to measure » The Economist

Looking at the question of whether automation could put low-paid sewing machine workers out of, well, work in countries such as Myanmar:

it is devilishly difficult to make a machine in which fabric goes in one end and finished garments, such as jeans and T-shirts, come out the other. The particularly tricky bit is stitching two pieces of material together. This involves aligning the material correctly to the sewing head, feeding it through and constantly adjusting the fabric to prevent it slipping and buckling, while all the time keeping the stitches neat and the thread at the right tension. Nimble fingers invariably prove better at this than cogs, wheels and servo motors. “The distortion of the fabric is no longer an issue. That’s what prevented automatic sewing in the past,” says Steve Dickerson, the founder of SoftWear Automation, a textile-equipment manufacturer based in Atlanta, where Dr Dickerson was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The company is developing machines which tackle the problems of automated sewing in a number of ways. They use cameras linked to a computer to track the stitching.

I’m moderating a session later this week looking at the questions around this topic: when automation and machine vision and capital come together to take these jobs away, what do the people who would have done them do instead?

USB-C has already won » The Verge

Sam Byford:

Although USB-C seems an inevitable success at this point, it does have a couple of issues to iron out, perhaps the most pressing of which is the complexity of its offering. There will be USB 2.0 devices with USB-C connectors, like the Nokia N1; USB 3.1 devices that use regular USB-A connectors; USB 3.1 “Gen 1” devices only capable of 5Gbps transfer speeds over USB-C, like the new Chromebook Pixel and MacBook; and USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices that give you 10Gbps. USB-C could be the only cable you ever need, but at this point it may be hard to know exactly what performance you’re going to get when you plug something in. “I think there’s the potential for confusion,” says [president and COO of the USB Implementers Forum, Jeff] Ravencraft, whose forum publishes language and usage guidelines for both USB 3.1 and USB-C.

“You do not get performance with the cable, you do not get power delivery with just the cable. The cable is a conduit for those things, right? So to have power delivery, the device has to have a power delivery controller, the host or the hub has to have a power delivery controller, and then you have to have the right cable.” The USB Implementers Forum offers training programs to help employees at retailers like Best Buy and Staples give accurate information to consumers, and is particularly aiming to crack down on “bad-actor” manufacturers that try to deliberately mislead.

MH17: forensic analysis of satellite images released by the Russian Ministry of Defence » bellingcat

With this new report all four major claims made at the Russian Ministry of Defence press conference have now been shown to be false:
– The MH17 flight path was not altered in the way claimed by the Russian Ministry of Defence. Data from the Dutch Safety Board’s preliminary report and other sources show Flight MH17 made no major course changes such as the one described in the Russian Ministry of Defence press conference.
– The Russian Ministry of Defence claimed the video of the Buk missile launcher presented by the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior was filmed in the Ukrainian government control town of Krasnoarmeisk. This has been proven to be untrue, with analysis of the video showing it was filmed in the separatists controlled city of Luhansk.
– Radar imagery was described as showing an aircraft close to Flight MH17 after it was shot down. Experts interviewed by various media organisations have stated this is almost certainly debris from Flight MH17 as it broke up over Eastern Ukraine.
– Satellite imagery shows Ukrainian Buk activity around July 17th. As this report shows, those claims are untrue, and were based on fabricated satellite imagery.

Weird that Russia is claiming to have had no involvement in MH17 and yet still takes the trouble to do this. But when you have a country whose leaders are paranoid.. well, read the next link.

The Agency » NYTimes.com

Adrian Chen on the “Internet Research Agency” in St Petersburg, which has industrialised the practice of trolling social media to promote Russian interests:

[Ludmila] Savchuk’s revelations about the agency have fascinated Russia not because they are shocking but because they confirm what everyone has long suspected: The Russian Internet is awash in trolls. “This troll business becomes more popular year by year,” says Platon Mamatov, who says that he ran his own troll farm in the Ural Mountains from 2008 to 2013.

During that time he employed from 20 to 40 people, mostly students and young mothers, to carry out online tasks for Kremlin contacts and local and regional authorities from Putin’s United Russia party. Mamatov says there are scores of operations like his around the country, working for government authorities at every level. Because the industry is secretive, with its funds funneled through a maze of innocuous-sounding contracts and shell businesses, it is difficult to estimate exactly how many people are at work trolling today. But Mamatov claims “there are thousands — I’m not sure about how many, but yes, really, thousands.”

That, though, is only the amuse-bouche. Then Chen finds himself dragged down the rabbit hole. Today’s must-read.

Lenovo replaces head of smartphone division as sales slump in China » Reuters

Liu Jun, one of four executive vice presidents under CEO Yang Yuanqing and a company veteran of 22 years, will be replaced by Chen Xudong, the head of ShenQi, a sub-division that sells mobile devices, the company said in a statement. Chen, 47, takes the reins of the division at a critical time. He must integrate the Motorola unit acquired from Google Inc for $2.9bn six months ago, while trying to counter a damaging slump in phone shipments. Lenovo, the fifth largest player in the Chinese market, shipped 22% fewer phones in the first quarter compared to the same period a year earlier, according to research firm IDC.

In stark contrast, Apple’s first-quarter China shipments jumped 62%, while Xiaomi and Huawei had gains of 42% and 40% respectively. Lenovo did not offer a reason for Liu leaving the post but said he would continue for an unspecified period as a special consultant to Yang.

Lenovo has a tough challenge with the tightening China market and Motorola’s integration.

How Twitter users can generate better ideas » MIT Sloan Management Review

in analyzing the structure of each employee’s Twitter network, we found that there was a positive relationship between the amount of diversity in one’s Twitter network and the quality of ideas submitted. However, Twitter activity and size measures (such as the number of tweets, number of followers and number of people followed) were not correlated with personal innovation.

We can explain these findings further by examining the Twitter sociograms of two EMC employees. In the diagrams, circles represent Twitter users, and an arrow from one user to another user indicates that the first user is following the second user on Twitter. Even though both employees A and B follow approximately the same number of Twitter accounts, A’s network is far more diverse than B’s. That is to say, the people whom employee A follows on Twitter are, for the most part, not following each other.

We can determine this level of diversity mathematically by using the compactness ratio, which measures the degree to which people in the network are connected to each other. For employee A, the network’s compactness ratio is quite low, at 18%. Our research found that loose Twitter networks, such as employee A’s, are better for ideation, because the potential for accessing a divergent set of ideas is greater.

Is it sort of “be less like Facebook”?

Start up: Apple’s transit plans, app monetisation, Samsung’s S6 rebuttal, bitcoin booboo, and more

Posted on June 2, 2015 by charlesarthur

Surely not caused by a Google car. Photo by Oakland Pirate on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Free like nitrogen. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Californians are OK with Google self-driving cars and are ready to ban non-self-driving cars » Emerging Technologies Blog

One of the blog’s readers gave their experience:

It’s safe to cut off a Google car. I ride a motorcycle to work and in California motorcycles are allowed to split lanes (i.e., drive in the gap between lanes of cars at a stoplight, slow traffic, etc.). Obviously I do this at every opportunity because it cuts my commute time in 1/3. Once, I got a little caught out as the traffic transitioned from slow moving back to normal speed. I was in a lane between a Google car and some random truck and, partially out of experiment and partially out of impatience, I gunned it and cut off the Google car sort of harder than maybe I needed too… The car handled it perfectly (maybe too perfectly). It slowed down and let me in. However, it left a fairly significant gap between me and it. If I had been behind it, I probably would have found this gap excessive and the lengthy slowdown annoying. Honestly, I don’t think it will take long for other drivers to realize that self-driving cars are “easy targets” in traffic.

Why do we assume everyone can drive competently? » Remains of the Day

Eugene Wei just avoided a cycling crash when a car turned into his cycle lane without warning:

For the next two blocks, I played my near collision on loop in my head like a Vine, both angry at the driver’s reckless maneuver and relieved as I tallied up the likely severity of the injuries I had just managed to escape by less than a foot of clearance. This is not an unusual occurrence, unfortunately. When I bike, I just assume that drivers will suddenly make rights in front of me without turning on their turn signal or looking back to see if I’m coming in the bike lane to their right. It happens all the time. It’s not just a question of skill but of mental obliviousness. American drivers have been so used to having the road to themselves for so long that they feel no need to consider anyone else might be laying claim to any piece of it. Though the roads in Europe are often narrower, I feel a hundred times safer there when biking there than I do in the U.S. All that’s to say I agree wholeheartedly with the writer quoted above that self-driving cars are much less threatening than cars driven by humans. As an avid cyclist, especially, I could think of nothing that would ease my mind when biking through the city than replacing every car on the road with self-driving cars.

iOS 9 Transit Maps to launch in a handful of cities in North America, Europe & China » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman, for it is he:

While Apple plans to debut its own mass transit directions service for Maps in iOS 9 as soon as June, the rollout will not be as ambitious as some users may have hoped. In its first iteration, Apple’s Transit service will only support approximately a half-dozen cities across the United States, Canada, and Europe, in addition to China, according to sources… In the United States, the planned launch cities are San Francisco and New York, two major metropolitan areas that are known for public transportation, while Toronto will be likely Canada’s sole representative for the iOS 9 Maps Transit feature at launch. In Europe, Apple is said to be gearing up to first launch the feature in London, Paris, and Berlin.

Google has been miles ahead in this for years (which made iOS 6 retrograde). Three years on, there are already lots of apps – especially Citymapper – which offer services like this. But it’s the integration that Apple has really lacked.

Google’s answer to the big problem with wearables » WSJ

Alistair Barr:

Wearable gadgets like smartwatches have seen a lot of hype but little commercial success. An obvious obstacle is that teensy touch screens can make such devices difficult to control. Google thinks it has an answer: a minuscule radar system that senses hand gestures. The company’s Advanced Technology and Projects research group shrank a radar system into a package roughly the size of a micro SD card, small enough to fit in a smartwatch. It beams a signal wide enough to capture hand motions and gestures and turn them into control signals, according to Ivan Poupyrev, who led the initiative called Project Silo. The tiny radar could let people control tiny-screen devices without having to touch them, he said during a session at the Google I/O 2015 developer conference. For instance, it transforms a twisting motion between thumb and forefinger into commands to scroll up and down a smartwatch’s screen. Poupyrev demonstrated by changing the hours and minutes on a small screen by rubbing his thumb and finger near to the radar gesture sensor. He also played a simple soccer game, his finger motions in midair near the sensor shooting an onscreen ball into a goal. ATAP plans to release the system to developers later in 2015, Poupyrev said.

This is one of those things that looks cool in demos, but I suspect could be prone to everything that real life is – mess-ups. Remember Leap Motion, another gesture control system? Went nowhere because waving your hand in the air isn’t a natural way to control things – because it’s prone to misinterpretation. Google might get this right, but it needs a ton of figuring out.

Apps spearhead Google’s battle with Apple » FT.com

Richard Waters and Tim Bradshaw:

Apple’s App Store accounts for about 45% of the revenue that developers make from apps, compared with 29% for Google’s Play, according to Digi-Capital. But counting in the income from handsets in China — where Google’s apps are blocked, meaning it makes no money — pushes the overall Android share to 52%, Digi-Capital calculates. Last week, matching — and trying to surpass — Apple was a strong subtext of Google’s pitch to developers. New features included Android Pay, a rival to Apple Pay and a fresh attempt to break into mobile payments after the disappointment of Google Wallet. A new Google Photos app — with the promise of software that can automatically organise libraries of pictures — also echoed capabilities that are already offered by Apple. But in other areas, Google seemed unprepared. While smartwatches based on last year’s Android Wear technology have been put in the shade by the launch of Apple Watch, Google had little new to show off in response. This was a sign that it is surrendering early leadership in wearables to Apple, according to Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Kantar Worldpanel.

The download share of Android in China is 62.8%, compared to 22.2% for Google Play, and 13.9% for Apple. Remarkable that non-Google Android is so big – but it only takes 23.8% of revenue, against 28.6% for Google Play, and 44.7% for Apple.

Hello world: Windows 10 available on July 29 » Microsoft Windows blog

Terry Myerson:

We designed Windows 10 to create a new generation of Windows for the 1.5 billion people using Windows today in 190 countries around the world. With Windows 10, we start delivering on our vision of more personal computing, defined by trust in how we protect and respect your personal information, mobility of the experience across your devices, and natural interactions with your Windows devices, including speech, touch, ink, and holograms. We designed Windows 10 to run our broadest device family ever, including Windows PCs, Windows tablets, Windows phones, Windows for the Internet of Things, Microsoft Surface Hub, Xbox One and Microsoft HoloLens—all working together to empower you to do great things. Familiar, yet better than ever, Windows 10 brings back the Start menu you know and love.

“Speech, touch, ink and holograms” is quite enticing. (That’s Hololens, of course.)

Asus brings a choice of sizes to Android Wear with ZenWatch 2 » The Verge

Vlad Savov:

The ZenWatch 2 runs the latest version of Android Wear, which was recently introduced with the LG Watch Urbane, however Asus’ watch is still a long way from actually being released. Asus tells us that it will reveal the full specs, pricing, and availability information during IFA in Berlin this September — leaving this as more of a promise than an actual product. The goal is to keep prices consistent between the two watch sizes, leaving the choice of strap to determine the particular cost. Update: The original article speculated that Asus’ metal crown will function like the digital crown in the Apple Watch, however we’ve now confirmed with Asus that it’s simply an external button and not a physical scroll wheel.

1) Doesn’t this Osborne [kill by preannouncement] the existing Zenwatch, even though there’s no price etc etc for the 2? 2) Which company will be the first, do we think, to mimic Apple’s digital crown and risk the sure-to-ensue lawsuit?

Samsung says S6 sales meet internal forecast » Korea Times

Kim Yoo-chul:

A Samsung spokesman in Seoul refused to release any official information on sales; but the company is expected to unveil figures at its upcoming investor relations forum on [Wednesday] June 3. Such remarks come a few days after Samsung Electronics Corporate Affairs President Park Sang-jin told reporters that the firm has been seeing a steady increase of sales on international markets. “You have to wait and see; however, the S6 and S6 Edge sales will be far higher than those of the S5” he said. The two models were unveiled during the Mobile World Congress 2015 event at the beginning of March. Both models were made available for purchase in April. Citing a report by CounterPoint Research, a research firm, eBEST Investment analyst Kim Hyun-yong said Samsung sold 6.1m S6s and S6 Edges in April. He added 305,000 S6s were being sold daily since the devices’ availability ― better than the S5 and S4’s 124,000 and 241,000 per day, respectively.

I’m finding it hard to believe that the S6 (and Edge?) is selling triple the number of the S5, and 50% more than the S4, at a time when Samsung is down in China and seen sales declines for months, and the S6 is on sale in fewer countries than the S5 was. Though with Samsung it’s hard to know what “sales” means – usually, it’s “sell-in”, as in sales to carriers.

Bitcoin app issues critical update after rare bug leads to total crypto breakdown » The Guardian

Alex Hern:

Bitcoin wallets are typically created by randomly generating a public address and a related private key. As a result, it is important for address and key to be truly random, or else it may be possible to guess the private key by looking at the public address. [Bitcoin wallet app] Blockchain used two sources of random numbers, in what ought to have been a belt-and-braces approach: it pulled a random number from the Android operating system’s built-in random number generator, and then connected to online service Random.org to get a second random number, which it combined with the first. Unfortunately, on some Android phones (reportedly including devices from the Sony Xperia range), the built-in random number generator failed to report back to the blockchain app. Normally, this should have been survivable, because the app used a second source of random numbers. But on 4 January, Random.org strengthened the security of its website, requiring all visits to be made over an encrypted connection. The blockchain app, however, continued to access the site through an unencrypted connection. So rather than getting a random number, as expected, it got an error code telling it that the site had moved. It then used that error code as the random number, every single time.

Not quite bitcoin itself screwed (it’s far too robust) but those using that app could find themselves all sharing a wallet.

Start up: Google Wallet v Android Pay, chip consolidation, Buzzfeed’s news numbers, Android Wear lessons, and more

Posted on June 1, 2015 by charlesarthur

Cooking, though not devised by computer. Photo by Nicolas Alejandro Street Photography on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Everyone else is seeing a different set. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump » YouTube

Do Androids dream of electric cheetahs in sheeps’ clothing jumping over things? Whatever it is.. this is very worrying.

Google may have left the best Android “M” feature out of the keynote: automatic app data backup and restore » Android Police

David Ruddock:

Yes, it’s happening. Dot. Gif. Android apps are finally getting state backup in the new “M” version of the OS. The full details are here. The short of it is that Android apps will now automatically back up to Google Drive, up to 25MB per app, with no new code required from developers. This is huge. What’s backed up? Settings and app data, which is to say, basically everything so long as you’re not talking about something over 25MB in total size. While this may still mean signing into your apps on a new device depending on the app’s security, once you do log in, the concept here is that all your settings and saved app data should just reappear on your new device. Which, holy cow, haven’t we been asking for this since the beginning of time?

Great – in 2016, Android will have the backup capability that iCloud offered since 2011. Given Google’s huge power in cloud services, it’s really strange this hasn’t been in place much earlier.

Some big changes are coming to Google Wallet now that Android Pay is here » AndroidAuthority

Jimmy Westenberg:

So if Pay is going to be the new payment standard on Android, what’s going to happen to Wallet? Well, a new post on the Google Wallet Google+ account is trying to help clear up this muddy situation. According to the post, the Wallet service has seen a ton of growth in the number of people sending money to one another, whether that’s through Gmail or the Google Wallet application. So, Google Wallet is sticking around, and will receive a big revamp in the coming months that sounds like it will focus on payment transfers, as opposed to actually handling the payments themselves. Here’s a little taste as to what the new Wallet app will bring, as explained by the Wallet team:

The new app will allow anyone with a US debit card to send and receive money for free within minutes – even if the other person doesn’t have the app. The money you receive can either be directly sent to your bank account or it can be spent in stores using the Google Wallet card.

We would be lying if we said this whole situation wasn’t confusing.

char-rnn cooking recipes » Github

“Nylki”:

The following recipes are sampled from a trained neural net. You can find the repo to train your own neural net here: https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn Thanks to Andrej Karpathy for the great code! It’s really easy to setup.

But now go and read the recipe. Beef! Pineapple! Orange juice! Sherry wheated curdup! “You made the recipe, you eat it.”

Android no longer competes with iOS » Naofumi Kagami

He called it back in April 2013 (“Predicting Android’s change of direction“). Now, he writes:

Google itself mentioned that Android M is mainly about fixing bugs and annoyances in Lollipop, and if that is to be believed, then the next version of Android coming out in 2016 should have many more features. However, since I am now more confident of my reading of Google’s strategic imperatives, I am pretty sure that this will not be the case. I predict that the 2016 version of Android will also not have any major new features. In short, I am now sure that Google no longer intends to compete with iOS with Android. Essentially, they are giving up the high-end smartphone market to Apple and they are cool with that. Instead, Google sees Android as a vehicle to spread their services to market segments that iOS cannot penetrate. How will this strategy fare in the future? This strategy is sound if Google’s sole objective is to learn about what people are doing. However, from a financial standpoint, there are many risks. By far the largest risk is, what if Apple is successful in distancing itself from Google? What if Apple somehow succeeds in significantly reducing the number of Google searches performed on iOS?

Charlie Warzel on Google’s ambitions post-I/O » Daring Fireball

John Gruber mulls:

In the demo, while playing a Skrillex song, Google director of product management Aparna Chennapragada asked the device, “What’s his real name?” And a moment later, the answer came: “Sonny John Moore”. Now on Tap is what allowed Google to know the context for “him”. It was a cool demo. But as soon as I saw it, I took my iPhone, held down the home button, and asked Siri, “What’s Skrillex’s real name?” And a moment later came the answer: “Sonny John Moore”. Allowing Google to index everything the apps you use show or play for you seems like a stiff privacy price to play for the ability to use “him” in that query, especially when, in my opinion, “What is Skrillex’s real name?” is the natural way most people would pose the question. Now on Tap has much more potential than this, of course. But, still. To me, this week’s I/O keynote made me more convinced than ever that Google is turning into the Microsoft of old: a company whose ambitions are boundless, who wants its fingers in every single pie, and who wants to do it all on its own. A company whose coolest stuff is always in the form of demos coming in the future, not products that are actually shipping now.

Wellll… the Photos app, which embodies machine learning (wonder if Pete Warden is involved – his company Jetpac was bought by Google last year), is shipping now, but cross-platform. That’s the thing: the some-day-my-demos-will-be-real things are OS-specific, while the right-here-right-now things are cross-platform. But that “new Microsoft” meme is a hard one to shake off. Notice how it attaches when you keep getting hardware wrong and have to try it again and again.

The five chip companies who will buy all the others » DIGITS to DOLLARS

Jay Greenberg:

As growth slows in an industry, the only way for companies to keep growing is to win market share (hard) or buy other companies. This is especially true in semiconductors because most of these companies outsource their manufacturing to the foundries like TSMC and Global Foundries. When one chip company buys another, the combined entity gets better pricing at the foundry (as they are now a bigger customer). The combination also gets to eliminate the duplicated non-design functions. You do not need two CEOs, nor two CFOs, not even two Corporate Development VPs (a not so subtle reminder that I am now looking for a new job). For several months now, I have been going around talking to friends at chip companies preaching this view – the industry will consolidate from over a hundred companies today down to five in a few years. In these conversations, I have always used Broadcom as an example. I would note that “Even Broadcom is not too big to get acquired someday.” So apparently, someday is yesterday. When the dust settles, I think there will be just five massive companies left in the business. (That will clear the decks for a new form of semis companies to emerge, but that is years away.) Here is my guess as to who the survivors will be.

You can probably guess three of them, but all five?

Five things Google figured out in Android Wear’s first year » Fast Company

Jared Newman:

At this year’s I/O, in lieu of splashy reveals, Google is announcing some minor tools for developers, including a way to show bird’s eye map views in their smartwatch apps. The company also revealed that it has 5,000 true watch apps in the Google Play Store, plus 1,500 custom watch faces. This year’s conference is mainly a time to reflect, and convince app makers that Android Wear is ready to compete with the Apple Watch.

Here are 2 and 3: “nobody agrees what looks good; people want smaller watches”. In pursuit of not achieving 3,

The brunt of the blame falls to the battery, which is the largest component by volume inside Android Wear smartwatches, [Android Wear lead product manager Jeff] Chang says. Still, Google doesn’t want to mandate smaller watches if it means giving up an always-on display or all-day battery life, which he sees as core values. “To accomplish an always-on screen that stays on the whole time, and at least one full day of battery life, and to have a really small volume battery, that’s a big challenge,” Chang says. “We’re working very hard on it, but we do uphold all those principles dearly.”

Good/fast/cheap; small/always-on/one-day. Choose two. (Note how Apple’s choices differ from Android Wear, but it’s still two out of three.)

BuzzFeed’s news is growing, but still a small part of its traffic » Digiday

Lucia Moses:

BuzzFeed drew 76.7 million multiplatform unique visitors in April, according to comScore. The publisher historically hasn’t broken out its content by vertical to comScore, like other top news sites including CNN, Yahoo and The Huffington Post do. But it started to on a limited basis as of last month, when it began breaking out its Entertainment and Life coverage, which stand at 43.7 million and 20.1 million uniques, respectively. BuzzFeed doesn’t break out its news traffic, suggesting it’s still relatively low. Bottom line, BuzzFeed may have made headway a short time, but it is still a small player when it comes to news, in which it includes business, tech, politics and longform. “You’ll hear clients say, ‘We want a BuzzFeed-style article,’” said Kim Alpert, director of digital strategy at Walton Isaacson. But when it comes to news, it hasn’t delivered a consistent product that’s instantly recognizable, she said. “Vice and Mashable, you kind of know what you’re going to get. I don’t believe their news has really matured in that people say, ‘I get my news from BuzzFeed.’” With CEO Jonah Peretti recently hinting at going public, BuzzFeed could invite more scrutiny of its editorial model. BuzzFeed’s main revenue source is native advertising, a format that has been criticized for mimicking editorial. The publisher also has admitted taking down posts at advertisers’ requests.

Start up May 29: leap second fretting, Pebble Time reviewed, Apple’s AR buy, and more

Posted on May 29, 2015 by charlesarthur

A leap second: good, bad or indifferent news? Photo by /amf on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

June 30 leap second worries markets, internet » GPS World

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that financial regulators and market participants are worried enough about the leap second that they’re planning for potential disruptions. The adjustment could present technical difficulties for traders and exchanges, as some computers might not be programmed to account for the adjustment, according to a Dow Jones report. “These guys are agonizing over it,” Steve Allen, a programmer-analyst at the University of California’s Lick Observatory, told Dow Jones. “It is definitely a hassle.” “The problem with the extra second is that it’s difficult to gauge how computer systems will react,” according to Journal writer Brian Hershberg. A US Commodity Futures Trading Commission spokeswoman said that “For the most part, we’re not too worried,” told Dow Jones. “But of course as the regulator, we do need to ensure folks are ready.” The last leap second occurred on June 30, 2012, and that leap second caused technical problems for websites and computing systems — including Reddit, Mozilla, Gawker, FourSquare, Yelp and LinkedIn.

Leap seconds are like millennium bugs that come around rather more often.

Apple acquires augmented reality company Metaio » TechCrunch

Ron Miller and Josh Constine:

A source told TechCrunch that clients who use Metaio are “flipping out” after seeing the shut down message on the website and not hearing a word from the company about what’s going on…until now. Metaio hadn’t taken traditional Silicon Valley venture capital, but had raised some money from Atlantic Bridge and Westcott. The company is well established. Many impressive projects have been produced using its tools including this one of with Ferrari that gives a potential buyer an AR tour of the car (as though the actual car isn’t cool enough): And this one for travelers in Berlin to see what the scene they are looking at would have looked like when the Berlin Wall was up. The program uses historical footage that you can see by pointing your smartphone or tablet at a particular place.

Apple getting into AR? I wrote about the resurgence in VR (which Google is pushing hard) for the Guardian; AR is actually slightly tougher.

Pay your way with Android » Official Android Blog

Pali Bhat, product manager:

With Android Pay you will be able to pay with your credit or debit card, across multiple Android devices, and at thousands of stores and apps that you already know and love. And by enabling bank apps to integrate with our platform, you’ll be able to add your credit and debit cards directly from bank apps for use with Android Pay. It’s still early days, but we’re very excited and think that this type of open platform will help drive adoption in mobile payments.

OK, and now let’s rewind almost exactly four years to May 26 2011, and the announcement of Google Wallet (which Android Pay replaces):

Because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a regular wallet ever could. You’ll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk. When you tap to pay, your phone will also automatically redeem offers and earn loyalty points for you… This is just the start of what has already been a great adventure towards the future of mobile shopping. We’re incredibly excited and hope you are, too.

The difference? Four years and the launch of Apple Pay last September. And a gradual shift in the utterly backward payment systems in the US towards NFC-capable checkouts.

Google ad chief says larger phones help with mobile sales » WSJ

Alistair Barr:

[Sridhar] Ramaswamy said the rising popularity of larger smartphones also helps. “As phones get bigger the space issue becomes less challenging,” he said, pulling his Nexus 6 smartphone out to show its six-inch display. “This is essentially a tablet. People’s ability to navigate sites and fill out forms and such goes up tremendously.” Mark Ballard, director of research at digital-marketing firm Merkle RKG, has spotted big increases in mobile-search ad prices over the past year. He said new, larger iPhones released last fall are part of the reason because they make it easier to buy something after clicking on a search ad. Ramaswamy declined to comment on the impact of larger iPhones. The Google executive questioned how Facebook, which has emerged as Google’s principal rival for online ads, measures how many users watch videos. YouTube counts a view when someone watches for at least 30 seconds, while Facebook counts a view more quickly. “How many of Facebook’s video views are engaged views?” he asked. A Facebook spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Well. Why won’t he comment on larger iPhones? Also: Facebook videos don’t need to be 30 seconds long – after all, a Vine can only be six seconds long. But of course Ramaswamy knows that. But not commenting on the iPhone seems like a defensive move as the default search placement on Safari comes up for renewal.

Review: Pebble Time » WIRED

David Pierce:

It’s true that a small subset of users, call it the Casio Calculator crowd, doesn’t care about looks. They’ll like the Time because it’s sturdy, durable, and easy to use. But when nearly every critique of wearables relates to aesthetics and personalization, you have to wonder how Pebble convinces anyone to even put this plastic brick on… …I want the uncluttered and productive idea Pebble is selling. But I don’t want the watch.

Pebble Time review: the smartwatch that beats Android Wear » WSJ

Nathan Olivarez-Giles:

For the Time, Pebble redesigned its watch interface using the analogy of a timeline: Press the top right button to go back in time (recent alerts, news items, past calendar events), and press the bottom right button to go into the future (upcoming events, games, etc.). The lone left button always takes you back a step, while the middle right button serves as an OK or Enter key. It’s an almost laughably simple way to organize what you see on screen, but it’s effective and the main reason I prefer the Time over any Android Wear watch I’ve tried so far. Android Wear is chaotic. It often feels like your watch is buzzing out of control and you’re drowning in phone notifications that keep showing up no matter how often you swipe to dismiss them. Pebble’s new timeline approach, on the other hand, makes sense as soon as you start clicking buttons. Order is calming. Without having to peep at a user manual, you know where your stuff is.

Odd approach: the WSJ has had three different people reviewing the Apple Watch, LG Urbane and now the Pebble Time. Why?

Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat » QuirksBlog

Peter-Paul Koch:

Most business entities that require an internet presence (think small shops, plumbers, hip food carts, or the like) will not end up [as an app icon] on your homescreen. Instead, they require one just-in-time interaction — when you need their opening hours, phone number, or menu. Users will expect this information on the web because they’re not going through the hassle of installing their app. Actually, this is very good news for the web. If the user doesn’t want your icon on his home screen, if the user wants a just-in-time interaction, it’s the web they want — not because of any inherent technological superiority, but because it’s hassle-free. Go there, read, forget. No junk left on your phone. Most businesses don’t stand a chance of ending up on the users’ home screens. So they need the web — but not a web that emulates native to no particular purpose.

His biggest criticism of cruft-y websites is news sites – but then the counterargument comes in, as he concedes, that news sites need to have URLs so people can find the content via search. Tricky.

December 2013: Android’s permissions gap: why has it fallen so far behind Apple’s iOS? » The Guardian

In December 2013 (that’s 18 months ago), I asked:

why would you let an app get that sort of access to your contacts, location, or storage? If you’re using Android, the answer is that you don’t get much choice, unless (like those 40%+ in the survey carried out by the Information Commissioner’s Office) you decide not to download the app. And the peculiar thing is that Google seems to be quite OK with that – and in fact has gone as far as to reverse an update which let users block apps from accessing data they shouldn’t. The consequences of that are already beginning to play out as people notice the difference – and complain in the only way they can, by giving apps lower ratings for what they see as excessive demands. The problem surfaced at the end of last week, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) first praised and then doled out brickbats to Google for implementing, and then reversing, a function which allowed users to set per-app permissions to data such as their contacts, call log, location and so on. To access it you had to download a free third-party app called App Ops Launcher.

Commenters’ response: “just don’t install the app”. Overlooking the fact that that had already been dealt with in the piece – the 40% who already don’t install. Apple’s iOS has had this on near-enough 100% of devices since September 2012. Android will have it in Android M. Android Lollipop, released in autumn 2014, is presently on 9.7% of devices. I forecast it will take until June 2017 for Android M to be on 50%.

Start up, May 28: LG Urbane reviewed, crashing iOS, who really bought Re/Code?, Meeker’s 2015, and more

Posted on May 28, 2015 by charlesarthur

Strong feelings, and not about the video game. Photo by gato gato gato on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends for 2015

Have to admit I haven’t read it (found it late) but it’s always essential reading. Download and peruse.

Apple’s ‘Proactive’ to take on Google Now with deep iOS 9 search, Augmented Reality Maps, Siri API » 9to5Mac

It’s that Mark Gurman guy again:

Apple began to lay the groundwork for Proactive with its acquisition of a personal assistant app called Cue in 2013, seeking to relevantly broaden iOS’s Spotlight and Safari search results. iOS 8’s ability to display Wikipedia Search results within Spotlight was the first taste of the Proactive initiative, and was partially designed to reduce iOS’s search reliance on Google. Sources say that Apple’s internal iOS usage metrics indicate that Google clicks have indeed fallen since iOS 8’s release last fall. Now Apple wants to take Proactive to the next level, and it may do so with iOS 9’s introduction at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8. While Apple has positioned Siri as an “intelligent personal assistant” since the fall 2011 launch of the iPhone 4S, Proactive will go much further to integrate with your data. To begin with, Proactive will become a new layer within the iOS operating system, replacing the pulldown Spotlight menu currently found on the iOS Home screen.

But he says there’s also disagreement about whether to launch this in iOS 9, which was sorta going to be the “Slow down, Snow Leopard” release. (Also, “augmented reality” always sounds cool and then disappoints. I’ve tried it. It ain’t all that.) I’d love to see the metrics around Gurman’s stories compared to those for Re/Code. I think he might be ahead in pure readership. But of course he doesn’t have a giant conference attached.

Bug in iOS Unicode handling crashes iPhones with a simple text » AppleInsider

AppleInsider reader Kaitlyn on Tuesday discovered that receiving the Unicode characters seen in the screenshot above through Apple’s iOS Messages app triggers iPhone restarts, lockouts from Messages, Springboard crashes and more. A thread on Reddit narrowed down the system crash and reboot errors to iOS Unicode handling. More specifically, the Unicode string in question is part of a much longer block of text that cannot be fully rendered in Notifications.

If you’re thinking this sounds retro, that’s because it is: same sorta bug (different string) did the same thing back in August 2013. Wonder how long the fix will take. Also: Apple Watch apparently not susceptible, which is super-puzzling.

A series of wholly unrelated observations about Vox Media’s acquisition of Recode » The Awl

Matt Buchanan points out that if you pull the threads of both companies for long enough, you end up – from both – at Comcast, where its venture arm is trying to sell a company to the main arm. Trebles all round, or something. Also, take a look at the tags on the story. (Via Charles Knight.)

The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland seizes documents at FIFA » Swiss Attorney General

Now, I don’t usually care about football (soccer to you Americans), but the evident corruption in FIFA (the “world governing body for football”) has been evident for years. Now, finally, something is happening – but not on just one, but two fronts:

In connection with irregularities surrounding football tournaments, two separate proceedings must be distinguished: The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) is conducting a Swiss criminal investigation regarding the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. For inquiries regarding this Swiss criminal investigation, please contact the OAG. In separate proceedings, and independently of the Swiss criminal investigation of the OAG, the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York is conducting a criminal investigation into the allocation of media, marketing and sponsoring rights for football tournaments carried out in the United States and Latin America. The Federal Office of Justice (FOJ) supports this criminal investigation as part of international legal assistance.

International Olympic Committee next?

Charles Johnson: world’s worst troll removed from Twitter » News.com Australia

Emma Reynolds:

Chuck is now raising money on his far-right website GotNews.com to have himself reinstated following this “censorship”. But his previous threats of legal action have never led to anything, with a website dedicated to the many times he has planned to sue for libel.

The list of things he has got egregiously wrong – on purpose? – is astonishing. But his whole schtick is about outrage and extremism. It’s more the attention paid to such people that’s the problem. When they’re just shouting to themselves, it means nothing.

Shipments of 2-in-1s to grow over 60% on year in 2015, says MIC » Digitimes

Notebook shipments, which are being impacted by tablets, are expected to drop 2.7% on year to reach 167m units in 2015, but 2-in-1 device shipments are expected to grow 62.5% on year to reach 13m units due to Microsoft’s aggressive promotions, according to figures from the Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC).

Compare to the estimated 7m Chromebooks: these are both still niche markets.

LG Watch Urbane review: why Android Wear trails Apple’s Watch » WSJ

Geoffrey Fowler:

The Urbane falls behind in its approach to the fundamental smartwatch problem: When technology is attached to our bodies, there’s a thin line between help and nuisance. Android Wear is the annoying little brother of operating systems. It really wants your attention, and to keep you swipe-swipe-swiping away on its little screen. A smartwatch’s purpose is to keep you plugged in so you don’t have to be glued to your phone. Since I started wearing an Apple Watch two months ago, I check my phone roughly 25% less, according to Moment, an app that monitors my habits. Ideally, a smartwatch should give you just enough information to keep your smartphone anxiety in check, but not so much that you’re tempted to keep looking at your wrist. The Urbane’s default settings do the opposite. When I just want to check the time, the Urbane often teases me with a notification “card” on the bottom of its screen. You’ve got four new emails! It’s 68 degrees today! You can quickly swipe it away, but after that one’s gone, there’s usually another card waiting.

Lots of room for improvement – but it’s still very early days. (Hadn’t heard of Moment before. “TRACK HOW MUCH YOU AND YOUR FAMILY USE YOUR PHONE”. Are you brave enough? Um, and it has a Watch version.)

Infomercial GIfs, because real life is hard. » Imgur

Zero tech in this collection of “how hard life is because we don’t have X tech that the informercial will sell you”. Lots of solutions looking for problems – happily, we don’t see the solutions, just guess at them (and, often, the problems). The most impressive, in my view, is the woman in the second GIF who juggles the bottle. That’s really hard to do badly well.

Start up: Ive v the SEC, Android M and the batteries, adblock apocalypse, and more

Posted on May 27, 2015 by charlesarthur

Imagine acting with this in front of you. Now read the first link.

A selection of 7 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Behind the scenes: Car Share, BBC1 » Broadcast

George Bevir:

The premise of BBC comedy series Car Share is simple enough: two colleagues (played by Peter Kay and Sian Foulkes) are forced to travel to work together as a result of a company car share scheme.

But with the action taking place inside a rather compact Fiat 500, the technical setup required to film the Goodnight Vienna production was anything but straightforward.

Kay and Foulkes made it look like two people in a car; seen from their view, you see how difficult it would really be to “act natural”. And what a hell of a rig. (Link via Dave Lee.)

Jony Ive’s “promotion” by Apple is driven by money and fear of SEC disclosure » Forbes

Eric Jackson makes a good case that Ive’s promotion to a non-managing role means that he won’t count as an “executive officer” and so his pay won’t have to appear on SEC filings (which Jackson thinks it should have for the past two years). A lawyer emails him:

Part of a company’s competitive advantage is having an employee that everyone else would salivate over having and not having to give your competitors the data points for exactly what it would take to lure that person over, assuming money would be a big factor for that person’s decision to move (which you point out it almost always is). As we’ve seen, more disclosure of exec comp has had a major correlation to the exponential increases in exec comp over the past 20-25 years. If I ran Apple and had a Jony Ive on my team, I’d put his comp in the same vault as the concept design for the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch 2. It would be treated as a trade secret.

[Rumor] Google taking renewed focus on battery and RAM in Android M, Dev preview expected again this year » Android Police

Liam Spradlin:

According to our information, battery is set to be a big focus in Macadamia Nut Cookie, with Google emphasizing performance and smarter use of features that might drain your battery.

Google is apparently urging its own teams to focus on battery performance by cutting location checkins when possible, trimming down RAM usage, and reducing activity off-charger and when the device’s screen is off. Presumably this renewed focus on performance will extend to Google’s own Play Services package, which frequently manages to wiggle its way to the top of battery usage stats.

According to our info, Google will discuss these changes at I/O.

It’s hard to say how these efforts will materialize in Android M. Google, with additions to L like JobScheduler and Project Volta, has already taken aim at improving battery and performance on Android, but familiar battery life complaints still linger on for many users, even on the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, Google’s flagship Lollipop devices.

Commenters unimpressed: “every year they say this”.

When Stephen Fry met Jony Ive: the self-confessed fanboi meets Apple’s newly promoted chief design officer » Telegraph

Stephen Fry:

ID [industrial design] is about the physical devices themselves while HI [human interface] is about the images, interactions, sounds, flow and feel of the software that we interact with as we use them.

With control over both, Ive has been able to migrate the mobile and desktop operating systems from their old-fashioned skeuomorphic rendering of app icons as real world representations (ring binders and even torn page effects on the contacts and calendars apps, for instance) into a brighter, clearer set of exquisitely designed images that speak for themselves. Ive’s inventiveness can perhaps most starkly be expressed by revealing that he has nearly 5,000 patents to his name. To give you some point of comparison, Edison was granted 2,332.

If nothing else Ive has done Britain a huge favour. Apple has recently developed a standard British power plug whose prongs fold elegantly back flush into their body. Easily stowed, no agony if accidentally trod on. A separate and wholly different solution to that offered by the Mu Plug which solves the problem in another way.

“It took ages to solve,” Ive says wistfully.

Of note: this piece is in the UK’s Telegraph, which seems to have the scoop (except it’s not written by a journalist); photos are taken by Gabriela Hasbun, a freelance photographer in San Francisco. Notable how the Telegraph is being chosen in the UK for Apple’s announcements.

Adblocks’ doomsday scenarios » Monday Note

Frederic Filloux:

In coming weeks, a large analytic firm will release disturbing figures on the state of the ad blocking scene. According to someone who has advanced knowledge of the data, on desktop computers and on critical segments of the digital audience, the use of ad blocking keeps rising exponentially.

Along with The Netherlands, the German market is by far the most affected one by the ad blocking phenomenon. There, ad block use approaches 40% of the internet population. The reasons for the epidemic are unclear…

…but if you read the comments, people will give you their views. A common refrain is that ads are often used to plant malware – a charge that publishers can’t deny, but which equally isn’t their fault. It never used to be a problem (per se) in print days.

The mystery of the power bank phone taking over Ghana » Quartz

Emmanuel Quartey noticed a bulky phone his friends were using:

I fired up Gmail and clicked the first email in my inbox — a promotional message by e-commerce startup, Jumia where it was the featured deal.
Since then, this phone keeps popping up everywhere I go. It’s obviously very popular, and it’s clearly taking off. But why?
Why’re some of my most stylish, most tech-savvy friends — all of whom already own smartphones — suddenly lugging this thing around?
This is what I’ve found.

Here’re some basic details about the phone:
Costs between 100 and 150 Ghana Cedis (about 25 to 38 USD)
Can hold up to 3 SIM Cards
Has built-in FM radio
Comes with Facebook and WhatsApp pre-installed
Doubles as a power bank to charge small electronics
LED flashlight

10,000 mAh battery = super long life. But then again, why not just have rechargeable battery packs? Answer: because these featurephones don’t have standard connectors.

Global smartphone growth expected to slow to 11.3% in 2015 as market penetration increases in top markets » IDC

The research company says:

smartphone shipments are expected to grow 11.3% in 2015, which is down from 27.6% in 2014. This is on par with IDC’s previous smartphone forecast of 11.8% growth in 2015. While overall smartphone growth will continue to slow, many markets will experience robust growth in 2015 and beyond, and worldwide shipment volumes are forecast to reach 1.9bn units annually by 2019.

IDC expects 2015 to bring two notable milestones. First, IDC projects this to be the first year in which China’s smartphone growth, forecast to be 2.5% in 2015, will be slower than the worldwide market. Second, and somewhat related to the China forecast, Android smartphone growth is also expected to be slower than the worldwide market at 8.5% in 2015. IDC believes both trends will persist throughout the forecast period, which now goes to 2019.

China smartphone shipments shrank year-on-year in the first quarter of 2015, IDC says, claiming saturation. This doesn’t quite make sense though. There are hundreds of millions of people in China, and elsewhere, without a smartphone. The block on growth is down to price, and perceived need: if you can’t get data, what’s the use?

Start up: a Microsoft BlackBerry bid?, Firefox’s dead mobile dream, Montblanc’s smart watchband, and more

Posted on May 26, 2015 by charlesarthur

Fitness lies within. Photo by cactusbeetroot on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Counted by computer. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mozilla overhauls Firefox smartphone plan to focus on quality, not cost » CNET

Scoop by Stephen Shankland:

Mozilla has revamped its Firefox OS mobile software project after concluding that ultra-affordable $25 handsets aren’t enough to take on the biggest powers of the smartphone world, CNET has learned.

The nonprofit organization rose to prominence with the success of its Firefox Web browser a decade ago, but it’s having trouble achieving the same success with its Firefox operating system for smartphones. According to a Thursday email from new Chief Executive Chris Beard, Mozilla has changed its strategy to a new “Ignite” initiative that emphasizes phones with compelling features, not just with lower price tags. It’s also considering letting its operating system run apps written for its top rival, Google’s Android.

The idea that Firefox OS could undercut Android was always ridiculous, because Android volumes brought prices down so quickly. This won’t work either though – there’s no “quality gap” in the middle, and certainly not in the high end. Firefox may be destined for obscurity by the world’s move to mobile.

Montblanc to Apple: our Swiss smartwatch will outlast yours » Bloomberg Business

Corinne Gretler on Montblanc’s “e-strap”, which attaches to the strap, rather than replacing the watch itself:

The device is the first luxury Swiss product to directly compete with the Apple Watch, which costs $349 for the most basic version and $17,000 for an 18-karat gold model. The e-Strap and compatible timepieces will appear in Montblanc boutiques and retailers such as Bloomingdale’s in the U.S.

“The pricing is reasonable,” said Patrik Schwendimann, an analyst at Zuercher Kantonalbank. “If it turns out to be just a fad, at least the consumer still has a nice, normal watch they can continue to wear.”

The e-Strap consists of a stainless steel display attached via a leather strap and designed to be on the backside of the wrist when the watch is on the front. A two-line touchscreen displays e-mails when they arrive.

When connected to a smartphone, Montblanc’s device can select songs and jump through playlists. It has an activity tracker that allows users to set targets for calories burned and steps taken. The e-Strap can also trigger the phone’s camera, facilitating easier “selfie” shots and group photos.

The e-strap is amazingly ugly; I can’t imagine anyone who would buy a Montblanc buying one, let alone using one, to go with their watches which cost (deep breath) $3,700 to $5,800.

One begins to see why Jonathan Ive considered that Switzerland might be screwed.

Samsung layoffs at Milk Music, Milk Video Unit; Kevin Swint exits » Variety

Janko Roettgers:

Samsung’s Media Solutions Center America, which is responsible for the company’s Milk Music and Milk Video services, has been hit by layoffs and a key exec departure over the last couple of weeks, Variety has learned. These events have occurred as Samsung executives take a closer look at many of its business units, which could spell trouble for the company’s content plans going forward.

Media Solutions Center America saw dozens of staffers laid off earlier this month, according to multiple sources. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but one source estimated that as much as 15% of the staff may have been affected. I’ve been told that MSCA employed around 250 people total before the cuts went into effect.

Samsung said it remains committed to delivering “engaging, connected entertainment experiences through its Milk platform.”

Flashback on Samsung denials:
November 2014: Samsung denies ChatOn to close
December 2014: ChatOn to close by March 2015.

Filling the green circle » Marco.org

Marco Arment:

Ever since getting the Apple Watch, not only have I been getting more consistent exercise, but I’m pushing myself further. I take more walks, and I walk faster and further than ever before. I’ve been walking hops around the same streets for four years, but now I’ve been discovering new streets and paths just to extend our walking distance and try to beat my previous walks.

I’ve never cared before, but now, I care.

Apple Watch: a Skinner box in a smartwatch’s clothing.

The new Google Photos app will automatically group your images by faces and recognized objects like cars, skylines, and food » Android Police

Ryan Whitwam:

Google’s current Photos app uses some image processing smarts to piece together auto-awesome compilations and Stories, but the new Photos experience pushes the limits of computer vision. Not only does it pick out and identify faces, it recognizes objects like cars and food. It’s not perfect, but it’s sometimes creepily accurate.

Hmm. Is this one of those “because we can!” features, or something that’s actually really useful? Apple has had a “faces” feature in iPhoto and now Photos (only on desktop), so that is certainly helpful. But “objects”?

DxOMark reviews the HTC One M9, ranks it 22nd best mobile camera on the market » Android Police

Jeff Beck:

DxOMark just released their review of the HTC One M9’s camera. I’m not going to beat around the bush, the results aren’t great (not that any of us here at AP are all that surprised). The HTC One M9 scored a rather abysmal cumulative score of 69, placing the Taiwanese manufacturer’s latest flagship in 22nd place on DxOMark’s top mobile camera list.

Also behind the iPhone 4S (yes, the 2011 device), GoPro Hero3 and Amazon Fire Phone, as well as pretty much everything else. Hard to know to what extent DxOMark’s marks are objective, but this isn’t promising for HTC if it was hoping to pull in new users who care about this stuff.

Edward Snowden comments on ‘Just days left to kill mass surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act’ » Reddit AMA

Edward Snowden in a thread in his reddit AMA, about the recently discovered weakness in SSL caused by 1990s crypto regulations, on what you’d do if you saw some encrypted traffic that looked like it needed investigation:

You then flag those comms and task them to CES [the NSA’s Cryptographic Exploitation Service] for processing. If they’ve got a capability against it and consider your target is worth using it against, they’ll return the plaintext decrypt. They might even set up a processor to automate decryption for that data flow going forward as matching traffic gets ingested as they pass the mass surveillance sensors out at the telecom companies and landing sites. If you don’t meet CES’s justifications for the capability use or they lack a capability, you get nothing back. In my experience NSA rarely uses meaningful decryption capabilities against terrorists, firstly because most of those who actually work in intelligence consider terrorism to be a nuisance rather than a national security threat, and secondly because terrorists are so fantastically inept that they can be countered through far less costly means.

Terrorists: a nuisance rather than a national security threat, and in general fantastically inept. That actually sounds about right. It’s just that sometimes they aren’t, and they aren’t.

‘Buy Buy’ BlackBerry? Microsoft could make offer for sleeping phone giant, rumors say » Somedroid

Rumors have been circulating recently that companies are lining up to acquire Blackberry. The shortlist includes Microsoft, Xiaomi, Huawei and Lenovo for now — last month, Samsung was reportedly also on the list but backed out after getting a $7.5bn asking price.

As of now, Microsoft seems to be preparing a $7bn offer for the company — that’s a 26% premium for the stock.

If Microsoft does buy it, that would be the second failing phone company it has bought. Personally, I don’t see the point.

BlackBerry laying off workers in handset unit » Re/code

Ina Fried:

BlackBerry confirmed on Saturday that it plans to cut jobs in the unit responsible for its smartphones as it seeks to make that shrinking business profitable.

The company said it has “made the decision to consolidate (the) device software, hardware and applications business, impacting a number of employees around the world.”

BlackBerry did not quantify the number of workers that would be affected.

Fried’s piece has the full statement from BlackBerry, which includes the quote

“One of our priorities is making our device business profitable. At the same time, we must grow software and licensing revenues. You will see in the coming months a significant ramping up in our customer-facing activities in sales and marketing.”

The device business isn’t profitable and would need huge changes – principally cuts in running costs, or a huge leap in handset ASPs – to become so.

Start up: explaining BlackBerry’s demise, Samsung S6 sales concerns, Apple Watch shipments, and more

Posted on May 25, 2015 by charlesarthur

Remember? Photo by BitchBuzz on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Samsung silent on disastrous Galaxy S6 sales » Forbes

Gordon Kelly:

70 million.

Earlier this year that was the number of Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge smartphones Samsung claimed it would sell in 2015. Samsung also claimed to have taken 20m pre-orders prior to both phones’ release. Sadly one month on the reality looks disastrously different…

Korean news agency Yonhap reports that it has taken a month for sales of the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge to reach 10m. Speaking to Yonhap a ‘high-ranking Samsung official’ confirmed this figure for the first time.

Trying to put a positive spin on it the official said: “The sales of the Galaxy S6 series have already surpassed 10 million.”…

…Consequently for combined sales of the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge to only pass 10m in a similar timeframe to the S5 and S4 represents a disastrous return. This is particularly true for the cheaper Galaxy S6 given Samsung has already confirmed demand for the Edge variant has been unexpectedly high.

All of which poses the obvious question: if Galaxy S6 Edge sales are performing above expectations, just how bad are Galaxy S6 sales?

Determined to get to the bottom of this I delayed this post in order to get official comment from Samsung. The company asked for 24 hours to respond, but eventually chose not to dispel any of the negative connotations or correct Yonhap’s figures. Instead its formal statement to me today was simply: “No Comment”.

Disastrous? Disappointing? Samsung supporters say the S5 was launched in 125 countries, the S6 in just 20 – so this 10m figure is “better” than last year’s. However that doesn’t explain how it could make such huge claims for preorders which then don’t seem to have been backed up by newer data.

There’s a growing suspicion in the tech world that the S6 isn’t succeeding as Samsung needs it to – because the business challenge is different from three years ago when the S3 was such a hit.

Apple Watch orders fell sharply after the first day and haven’t grown since, a shopping data firm says » Quartz

Dan Frommer:

Apple has taken orders for almost 2.5m watches in the US through Monday, May 18, according to Slice’s projections, which are based on more than 14,000 online shoppers. More than half of those orders were placed on April 10, the first day Apple accepted watch pre-orders in the US and eight other countries, according to Slice.

Since the first day—which we’ve excluded from this next chart to focus on detail—US orders have generally remained under 30,000 per day, according to Slice’s projections. Note the spike on April 24, the day US pre-orders started arriving—and when people started posting their initial Apple Watch experiences and real-life photos.

…One Wall Street analyst, Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty, recently increased her projection of first-year global Apple Watch shipments to 36m, based on survey results showing increased purchase intentions among US consumers. A second firm, however, just reportedly decreased its estimates to less than 15m watches, based on weak demand. To reach 36m shipments, Apple would need to average almost 100,000 per day worldwide.

30,000 in the US alone (if we assume the data is correct). Could the rest of the world triple that? Even if not, it means Apple has taken over the smartwatch market at a stroke.

Tracking protection for Firefox at Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2015 » Monica Chew

My paper with Georgios Kontaxis got best paper award at the Web 2.0 Security and Privacy workshop today! Georgios re-ran the performance evaluations on top news sites and the decrease in page load time with tracking protection enabled is even higher (44%!) than in our Air Mozilla talk last August, due to prevalence of embedded third party content on news sites. You can read the paper here.

That 44% figure shows how the desire to know more about the audience in order to monetise the audience better is hurting the audience’s experience. That’s the sort of thing that drives adblocking.

The peak of ‘free’ on the Internet » Mashable

Jason Abbruzzese:

maybe we’ll look back at this point in time wistfully, telling tales of freely streaming music and viral videos. Perhaps the best days of the internet are behind us and its now just a platform on which mega-conglomerates can make money.

Or maybe this will come to be seen as a point where the internet’s initial promise of democratized distribution began to be fully realized. There’s a certain shabby charm in the weird old web with its terrible banner ads and dark humour. You can still find it, mostly on reddit.

The bottom line is that just about everything is online these days in every medium and almost all of it is free. As subscription services grow in number and popularity, that’s going to inevitably form a smaller part of the overall internet. The bottom line is that just about everything is online these days in every medium and almost all of it is free. As subscription services grow in number and popularity, that’s going to inevitably form a smaller part of the overall internet.

I think smartphones’ essentially closed nature – that they tend to be endpoints for app content – makes subscription models easier, for those which can charge for them. (A point Abbruzzese makes.) But there are still 750m or so PCs in the hands of consumers. That’s a lot of computing power able to crack DRM.

Analyzing the iPhone user base » Above Avalon Premium Recap

Neil Cybart, in a post that would normally be via premium access only:

Running basic arithmetic with that 48m number [of iPhone 6/6 Plus sold in January-March] and Tim Cook’s comments about the installed base, I get an iPhone installed base of approximately 475 million users. Is this an exact number? No. Is this a good estimate of roughly the number of people with an iPhone (all models)? Yes.

With this estimate in hand, we can start to break out the iPhone base by model. iPhone 6 has been outselling 6 Plus by approximately 2.5x, while both have been outselling the iPhone 5s and 5c by nearly 4-to-1. Taking into account these ratios, I suspect the current iPhone user base breakout looks something like:

iPhone 6: 85 million users
iPhone 6 Plus: 35 million users
Older (5s, 5c, 5, 4s): 355 million users
Total: 475 million users

He then breaks it down further; turns out the bulge in ownership is of the 5S, at 125m users. (You can sign up for Cybart’s premium analysis on his website. Also: is there any equivalent premium analysis for Android?)

NSA planned to hijack Google App Store to hack smartphones » The Intercept

Ryan Gallagher:

The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes were working on during workshops held in Australia and Canada between November 2011 and February 2012.

The main purpose of the workshops was to find new ways to exploit smartphone technology for surveillance. The agencies used the Internet spying system XKEYSCORE to identify smartphone traffic flowing across Internet cables and then to track down smartphone connections to app marketplace servers operated by Samsung and Google. (Google declined to comment for this story. Samsung said it would not be commenting “at this time.”)

As part of a pilot project codenamed IRRITANT HORN, the agencies were developing a method to hack and hijack phone users’ connections to app stores so that they would be able to send malicious “implants” to targeted devices. The implants could then be used to collect data from the phones without their users noticing.

Irritant horn. Such fabulous names the random two-word generator throws up. Wonder what the scheme that must have existed to do the same to iOS apps was called?

The inside story of how the iPhone crippled BlackBerry » WSJ

Extract from “Losing the Signal”, a book by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff:

If the iPhone gained traction, RIM’s senior executives believed, it would be with consumers who cared more about YouTube and other Internet escapes than efficiency and security. RIM’s core business customers valued BlackBerry’s secure and efficient communication systems. Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, “was not a space where we parked our business.”

The iPhone’s popularity with consumers was illogical to rivals such as RIM, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc. The phone’s battery lasted less than eight hours, it operated on an older, slower second-generation network, and, as Mr. Lazaridis predicted, music, video and other downloads strained AT&T’s network. RIM now faced an adversary it didn’t understand.

“By all rights the product should have failed, but it did not,” said David Yach, RIM’s chief technology officer. To Mr. Yach and other senior RIM executives, Apple changed the competitive landscape by shifting the raison d’être of smartphones from something that was functional to a product that was beautiful.

As Horace Dediu pointed out on Twitter, Yach simply misunderstood the new basis of competition. It wasn’t “functional v beautiful”; it was a new axis of functionality, such as the web browser that BlackBerry didn’t offer.

One nitpick: the writers call mid-2007 RIM (as it was) “the world’s largest smartphone maker”. Nokia was shipping more smartphones, and its smartphone revenue was larger too.

BlackBerry, it’s revealed, didn’t have the flexibility of thinking to adjust to the changed world; the awful Storm (1m sold, 1m needing replacement) was perhaps its nadir.

The lesson of “don’t forget all the parts move” » Learning by Shipping

Steve Sinofsky on the BlackBerry excerpt:

While hindsight is always 20/20, when you are faced with a potentially disruptive situation you have to take a step back and revisit nearly all of your assumptions, foundational or peripheral, because whether you see it or not, they are all going to face intense reinvention.

In disruptive theory we always talk about the core concept that disruptive products are better in some things but worse in many of the things (tasks, use cases, features) that are currently in use by the incumbent product. This is the basis of the disruption itself. In reading the excerpt it is clear that out of the gate this reality was how the RIM executives chose to view the iPhone as introduced as targeting a different market segment or different use cases…

…There’s a natural business reaction to want to see a new entrant through the lens of a subset of your existing market. Once you can do that you get more comfortable doing battle in a small way rather than head-on. You feel your market size will trump a “niche” player.

Sinofsky also wrote usefully on this topic in 2013. Read both posts along with the WSJ’s BlackBerry one.

Google seeking Taiwan partners to promote Chromebook, say makers » Digitimes

Google recently launched an education-use Chromebook for sale at US$99, the sources noted. In a bid to market inexpensive Chromebooks in emerging markets, Google has adopted chip solutions developed by China-based Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics and won support to launch models from China-based vendors Haier and Hisense as well as India-based Xolo and Indonesia-based Nexian, the sources indicated.

Google shipped 6.5m Chromebooks in 2014, mostly for educational use in the North America market, and expects to ship 8m units in 2015, the sources said.

Also talking to Acer and Asus. Trouble for PC makers is that Chromebooks are an even greater example of the “value trap” than Windows. If you’re selling stuff for $99 and the margin is low, you need huge scale to make any profit at all. And the scale so far is tiny.

Start up: dual-app iPads?, Pebble’s cash call, improving S6 battery life, Chromebook sales and more

Posted on May 22, 2015 by charlesarthur

S6 discharging too fast? This might sort it. Photo by AndyArmstrong on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Future of iPad: dual-app viewing mode, then J98/J99 ‘iPad Pros,’ multi-user support » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman:

Facing slowing growth for the first time since the iPad’s 2010 debut, Apple is working on several significant software and hardware updates to reinvigorate the tablet over the next year. Apple is developing a dual-app viewing mode, 12-inch iPads codenamed “J98″ and “J99,” as well as support for multi-user logins, according to sources briefed on the plans. First planned for debut last year, the split-screen applications feature for the iPad could be introduced as soon as June at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, while multi-user login support and the 12-inch iPads will apparently arrive later…

In Gurman we trust. He’s never told us they’re working on a TV. And these improvements would help the iPad in businesses, which is the next frontier for tablet penetration.

Adult dating site hack exposes millions of users » Channel 4 News

Geoff White:

Channel 4 News has been investigating the cyber underworld, discovering which websites have been hacked and exposing the trade in personal information of millions of people through so-called “dark web” sites.

The investigation led to a secretive forum in which a hacker nicknamed ROR[RG] posted the details of users of Adult FriendFinder. The site boasts 63 million users worldwide and claims more than 7 million British members. It bills itself as a “thriving sex community”, and as a result users often share sensitive sexual information when they sign up.

The information of 3.9m Adult FriendFinder members has been leaked, including those who told the site to delete their accounts…

…The front page of Adult FriendFinder, which is based in California, features photos of dozens of attractive young women. Yet the hacked data, contained in 15 spreadsheets, reveals how few females appear to use Adult FriendFinder.

Among the 26,939 users with a UK email address, for example, there are just 1,596 who identified as female: a ratio of one woman to every 16 men.

How.. unsurprising.

Rumor has it that Pebble is on the rocks even with $18m in the bank » TechCrunch

John Biggs:

Smartwatch maker Pebble seems to be in some trouble. According to sources close to the company, the company is having trouble maintaining its growth and has turned to a Silicon Valley bank for a $5 million loan and $5 million line of credit. Valley VCs have been turning down the company’s requests for new capital.

Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky offered no comment.

Actually this feels like cashflow: it has to commit factory time to make those watches, and VC money isn’t what it needs; it needs a line of credit to pay for that. Whether it’s in trouble is a different question. I’d be surprised if it were.

Few business takers yet, but Chromebook sales grow to 7.3 million this year » ZDNet

Liam Tung:

The number of the low-cost Google-powered laptops sold this year is on track to grow 27m, up from 5.7m units in 2014 to 7.3m in 2015, research from analyst house Gartner shows.

The Chromebook’s growth contrasts markedly with the shrinking global PC market. However, sales of the devices remain heavily skewed towards the US and within that market, they’re largely used in schools, despite growing interest from consumers in the country.

In 2014, the US accounted for 84% of all Chromebooks sold, with 60% of sales coming from education, 39% from consumers, and 1% from business.

Last year, noting signs of growing interest among businesses for Chromebooks, Gartner forecast that by 2017 sales to the education sector could rise to over 6m units, driving total sales for the year to 14 million laptops sold.

Its outlook for the next two years is more conservative, with the analyst predicting shipments to rise to 7.9m by 2016, suggesting growth of under 10% for next year.

This in a market of about 300m PCs per year. Not the dramatic displacement that had been expected. Chromebooks began in 2009. Do they really offer too little utility, or are people too wedded to Windows even though cloud services would serve them fine?

Not so fast: connected cars could cause data traffic jams » Reuters

Eric Auchard:

Traffic jams in the future could cause potentially dangerous data snarl-ups as cars packed with entertainment, safety and navigation features vie for airwaves with smartphones, tablets and networked features in other vehicles, according to a study.

By 2024, mobile networks will see machine-to-machine (M2M) connections jump 10-fold to 2.3 billion from 250 million in 2014. Half these links will be automotive, said the study published on Thursday by Machina Research.

On the roads, about one in five vehicles worldwide will have some form of wireless network connection by 2020, or more than a quarter of a billion connected vehicles, according to a forecast from technology research firm Gartner.

This one tweak could boost battery life on your Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge » ZDNet

My ZDNet colleague, Matthew Miller, bought and then returned a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. He liked the phone, but in the end, the poor battery life he experienced was a deal-breaker.

That’s the same problem Business Insider’s Antonio Villas-Boas found after using a Galaxy S6, essentially the same handset but without the curved edge displays, for a month. Villas-Boas learned that one single setting solved his battery life issues, however.

“I switched off Google Now, Google’s digital assistant, and my battery life skyrocketed to last me about 36 hours on a single charge with relatively decent usage, including music streaming, but without using Bluetooth or GPS. I charge it every night, but I usually have just under 50% battery left before I go to bed.”

That’s interesting for a few reasons. First of all, if it addresses the short run-time on a single charge, the setting change provides a reasonable workaround for Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge owners.

Second, there’s something else going on with Google Now on these particular handsets: The always listening feature of Google Now stopped working on these two handsets for many people in the middle of April. Google is aware of the problem, publicly noting on April 23 that it is actively working on a solution.

Some suggestions that Google Now is optimised (somehow) for Qualcomm processors; the S6 and S6 Edge uses Samsung’s own Exynos. That’s a problem is Google Now is killing the battery, though.

The clock is ticking for Dropbox » Business Insider

Eugene Kim, with a good investigative piece:

After coming out of Y Combinator in 2007, Dropbox hit 100 million users by 2012, and 300 million by 2015. That rapid growth made some people feel like they’d already made it. “There wasn’t that sense of ‘We haven’t won yet,'” this former employee says.

This person also tells us that DfB growth was “not stellar” as of the middle of last year.

Another person who left Dropbox last year said that the company has become noticeably slower as it’s gotten larger. (Dropbox went from 500 to 1,200 employees in the past 12 months.)

For example, a simple team change request had to go through multiple HR managers, creating a culture of heavy “process” that many engineers dislike.

In fact, in one of the internal surveys that asked if the engineers felt they were empowered to perform at full potential, almost half of them said “No,” according to this person.

What’s Dropbox’s USP?

Myntra sales dip 10% in app-only mode, rivals Amazon, Snapdeal, eBay to play safe for now » The Economic Times

Varun Jain:

Myntra.com, India’s largest online fashion retailer, has seen a 10% drop in sales since it shut its website and turned a mobile app-only etailer last week. The company, owned by Flipkart, had factored in such a decline and hoped to return to the level of sales prior to the move in the coming weeks, according to a source. Its closest rivals, Snapdeal and Amazon, however, said they had no plans to wind up their websites and focus only on mobile phone users.

“Our data shows that there are still many customers who use PCs to shop online. We do not want to force our customers to use one specific medium to shop on Snapdeal,” a Snapdeal spokesperson said.

The app-only approach seems to follow this logic: if you’re dependent on web visits for traffic and hence revenue, you’re vulnerable to someone who has better SEO or the vicissitudes of the dominant search engine. Better therefore to build up a loyal audience on the app, and drive people there through advertising.

Start up (May 21): Cisco in Russia, more Google Maps malarkey, a Watch forecast cut, and more

Posted on May 21, 2015 by charlesarthur

Somehow this didn’t publish on May 21 as it should have. Bah.

Android Wear lets you do all sorts of watchfaces. Photo by leolambertini on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

After sanctions, Cisco altered sales records in Russia » BuzzFeed News

Aram Roston and Max Seddon, with a blockbuster piece:

After Western sanctions began shutting down sales of high-tech internet equipment to Russia’s military and security forces, employees at technology giant Cisco Systems Inc. altered sales records and booked deals under a false customer name, according to internal company documents. The intent, according to a confidential source with deep knowledge of Cisco’s Moscow operations, was to dodge the sanctions by masking the true customers behind more innocuous-sounding straw buyers.

Nonononononotatall we were just correcting some errors, says Cisco.
Remind me again about how Buzzfeed is just cat pictures and listicles?

Sex, monsters and outrage » Public Address

Joshua Drummond on the outrage (overhyped) about students in a sex education class being handed literature that, um, outraged some people:

By analogy, it’s a lot like students studying World War Two. Some knowledge of the Nazis’ peculiar, perverted ideology and the conditions in which it flourished is necessary to understand how the war got going. But no-one’s being taught that Nazis are rad, any more than they’re being taught that unmarried women are sluts in this particular case. The lesson was – and why not have some fun with paraphrasing – intended to point out the unfortunate truth that there are a lot of dicks in the world and some of them try to force their dickery on others. I’d have thought this was a pretty important lesson, especially when it comes to sexual health, and where better to experience it than in the (relatively) safe space of a health education class?

No! said Labour education spokesperson Chris Hipkins, who thundered mildly: “It’s fine for schools to be using stuff to provoke kids into thinking but there’s a fine line between provoking critical thought and something that’s offensive. That, I think, crosses the line.”

Well, I suppose that’s up for debate. Should students be privy to the extremist views of nutcases?

What’s most worrying is that, as always happens, the initial distortion gets far more broadly distributed than the correction.

Think about that: the wrong stuff always gets the broader distribution.

Facebook’s Internet.org comes under fire for being a walled garden » Fortune

Mathew Ingram:

In effect, says the EFF, the structure of Internet.org means that Facebook has set itself up as a gatekeeper when it comes to accessing the Internet, and this means that it has “issued an open invitation for governments and special interest groups to lobby, cajole or threaten them to withhold particular content from their service.” Until the social network truly opens up the project to anyone and everyone, Internet.org will “not be living up to its promise or its name,” the foundation says.

Today’s solar panels are fine for tomorrow » Solar Love

Steve Hanley:

An interdisciplinary MIT study led by the MIT Energy Initiative has led to a 332-page report entitled The Future of Solar Energy. Among its key findings are that today’s solar panels are all that is needed to supply the world with many terawatts of clean solar power by 2050 (a terawatt is equivalent to 1,000,000 megawatts). The other main point the study makes is that it will take political will to finally wean the world off of fossil fuels.

I was pointed to this on Twitter by Leonardo DiCaprio. Yup, him. Not personally, you understand.

KGI lowers Apple Watch forecast to 15 million » WatchAware

Abdel Ibrahim, commenting on 9to5Mac reporting on KGI research lowering its estimat for the lead from 20-30m to “just” 15m:

As with any new product, it takes time for things to get going. New features, functions, and even new versions are what will be the most important test for Apple Watch in the coming years. Most V1 products are usually adopted by the comparatively small minority of Apple fans who are interested in the company’s latest gadgets.

15m feels astonishing. For a v1 product? And as Ibrahim points out, that’s a lot more than Android Wear seems to be doing (downloads passed 1m in late February, now around 1.2m).

Proper Google Maps app appears on Android Wear via latest phone app update » Android Central

Andrew Martonik:

The app can be launched from the app launcher or by voice with an “open Maps” command, and when opened you get a full screen top-down map experience. You can scroll around, pinch-to-zoom (barely) and even switch between true North and device direction views. Zoom in/out buttons appear on the top of the screen when you tap it, which is much better than pinching, and you also get a small pin button that lets you quickly scroll through nearby places and navigate to them — though when you fire up navigation from the Maps app on the watch it still corresponds with launching Maps on your phone.

There’s even a neat feature that gives you a simple black and white outline map when the watch doesn’t receive interaction for while, just like the ambient watch faces do.

Aside from the handful of reboots of our phone and watch that were necessary just to get it to run, the app still seems rather unstable. Several times in just a few minutes of playing with the app it has failed to respond or open up navigation properly — we have a feeling that this isn’t quite ready without a new version of Google Play Services or potentially a new version of Android Wear on the watch.

Options for resizing: pinch-to-zoom or prodding a plus/minus onscreen tab. Neither seems ideal. The black/white outline map is horrible. The “list of pins” looks smart.

How do I get rid of the “Try the New Drive” banner? » Google Product Forums

Q: It is super annoying and it won’t go away. I’ve tried going to the new drive and then coming back, but it’s still there. I like the old drive a lot better than the new one and I want to stay on it. This banner is basically trying to force me to use the new drive which I *don’t want to do*. Anyone know if there’s a way to get rid of it??

And wouldn’t you know, there’s a Googler ready with an answer. However…

Apple Watch and Continuous Computing » Stratechery

Ben Thompson has a fantastic examination of the Watch’s potentials, and limits, as well as Apple’s advantages and strategic disadvantage:

it’s clear that what the mouse was to the Mac and multi-touch was to the iPhone, Siri is to the Watch. The concern for Apple is that, unlike the others, the success or failure of Siri doesn’t come down to hardware or low-level software optimizations, which Apple excels at, and which ensures that Apple products have the best user interfaces. Rather, it depends on the cloud, and as much as Apple has improved, an examination of their core competencies and incentives argues that the company will never be as good as Google. That was acceptable on the phone, but is a much more problematic issue when the cloud is so central to the most important means of interacting with the Watch.

A key advantage: lots of people who will buy it and use it, creating a virtuous circle for developers who write for it. (Yes, a calculator for the Watch.)

Breaking News: Howard University shows up as ‘N***er University’ on Google Maps » Seely Security

Bryan Seely:

A few hours ago, Bomani X @AceBoonCoon updated his twitter feed with yet another one of his shocking discoveries on Google Maps. Yesterday the world took notice when he posted an image of his Google Maps results where he found that when he searched for the keyword ‘nigga’ or ‘nigger’ , the White House would come up. Unfortunately, President Obama and his family are not the only targets of this deplorable prank. When you run a Google Maps search for ‘nigger university’ you get search results for ‘Howard University,’ a private university in Washington, D.C.

Beginning to look like we’re discovering the limits of useful crowdsourcing. (Though of course the Google search for “miserable failure” of a few years ago was already showing the dangers.)

Driverless cars may cut US auto sales by 40%, Barclays says » Bloomberg Business

Keith Naughton:

US auto sales may drop about 40% in the next 25 years because of shared driverless cars, forcing mass-market producers such as General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. to slash output, a Barclays Plc analyst said.

Vehicle ownership rates may fall by almost half as families move to having just one car, according to a report published Tuesday by the analyst, Brian Johnson. Driverless cars will travel twice as many miles as current autos because they will transport each family member during the day, he wrote.

Large-volume automakers “would need to shrink dramatically to survive,” Johnson wrote. “GM and Ford would need to reduce North American production by up to 68% and 58%, respectively.”…

…When most vehicles are driverless, annual U.S. auto sales will fall about 40% to 9.5%, while the number of cars on American roads declines by 60% to fewer than 100m, he estimated.

“While extreme, a historical precedent exists,” Johnson wrote. “Horses once filled the many roles that cars fill today, but as the automobile came along, the population of horses dropped sharply.”

Hard to argue against that one.

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